Chapter 12: The Black Wind in the Tunnel

From Hurried Ascensions
by Esi Noire

The lights went out.

Not a flicker. Not a fade. Just…gone.

Rene stood still, heart steady, breath slow. She’d learned now that fear had shape, and if she held herself still long enough, she could shape it back.

Then came the wind.

It didn’t blow *through* the car.

It came *from it*.

A sudden rush, heavy and thick, like the exhale of something older than steel. And within it, language. Whispers that scraped along the walls like chalk dragged over slate.

Not English. Not Swahili. Not Arabic. Not anything Rene had ever studied.

But she understood it.

The wind spoke in the voices of the forgotten who’d *never* ridden, those swallowed by tunnels under cities, under rivers, under shame. Miners buried beneath collapsed shafts. Prisoners lost in transport. Children stolen by underground “schools” that buried their tongues.

*We were not allowed to speak.*

*We were not allowed to call home.*

*We speak now.*

The tunnel lit up, not with bulbs, but with pulse. The walls revealed glyphs carved by hands long dead: spirals, names, marks of resistance.

One phrase blazed in the dark:

**“We are not gone. We were buried awake.”**

Rene closed her eyes and sang one word, soft and from the deepest part of her chest:

**”Shukr.”**
Gratitude.

The wind softened.

The tunnel quieted.

And a path appeared.